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Just weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, the American public was provided with dispositive information on Donald Trump’s beliefs about women, sex, and the rights of men, particularly famous men. The information was delivered, unmistakably, in his voice. On October 7th, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold published a video of Trump, circa 2005, chatting merrily on a bus with Billy Bush, the co-anchor of “Access Hollywood,” as Trump prepared to make a guest appearance on an episode of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”

Trump bragged of his impulsivity. “I don’t even wait. And, when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

In the same session, Trump was recorded saying that he had tried and failed to seduce Bush’s co-host at the time, Nancy O’Dell. “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he said. “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. . . . I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.”

Initially, Trump failed to follow the dictum he had learned at the feet of Roy Cohn: Never apologize, never explain. After a fashion, he did both. He minimized the offense as “locker-room talk,” adding that his opponent’s husband, Bill Clinton, had “said far worse to me on the golf course.” Soon, however, he began denying that the recording was even genuine. At Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton, Anderson Cooper asked him, “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”

Trump, after allowing that he was embarrassed by the incident, tried to change the subject—to ISIS terrorists chopping off heads—and insisted, “I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”

COOPER: So, for the record, you’re saying you never did that.

TRUMP: Frankly, you heard these things I said. . . . I have tremendous respect for women—

COOPER: Have you ever done those things?

TRUMP: —and women have respect for me. And I will tell you, no, I have not. And I will tell you that I’m going to make our country safe. We’re going to have borders for our country, which we don’t have now. . . . We’re going to make America safe again, and we’re going to make America wealthy again.

Many things go into a voter’s decision, but the “Access Hollywood” tape and the gross lack of character reflected in it did not prove disqualifying in the 2016 election. A year later, Billy Bush, who is George H. W. Bush’s nephew, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times declaring, “Of course he said it.” Bush said that he and “seven other guys present at the bus at the time . . . assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But, after reading numerous firsthand accounts of women who had been on the receiving end of Trump’s forcible affections over the years, he believed them. He was appalled and clearly resented Trump’s attempts to deny that the voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape was his. Bush wrote, “To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump. You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.”

Trump’s attitude toward women was never unclear. As a businessman on the make for publicity, he was always eager to describe his conquests, real and imagined, for the benefit of gossip columnists and talk-show hosts. Since he became a politician, the picture has only sharpened. Around twenty women have publicly accused the President of various forms of sexual misconduct. (He has always denied the accusations.) In 2023, a New York jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll a five-million-dollar civil judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse. She accused Trump of assaulting her in the mid-nineties in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store, in New York. (Trump has denied Carroll’s account and has called on the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.)

On Tuesday, as the Justice Department continued to release the avalanche of documents and photographs known collectively as the Epstein files, some, but hardly all, major news outlets reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who abused hundreds of female athletes and pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten text reflects contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his past. While all three men shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “loved to ‘grab snatch,’ ” only Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”

The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Associated Press. But is it real? There is no reason to believe that it is. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for many years, wrote on X, “This is suspect to me, largely because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way he wrote, either. Plus it really looks like a woman’s handwriting.” The Justice Department later announced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”

The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence. As we continue to sift daily through the detritus of Trump’s accumulating record and biography, we keep living with the notion that somehow, somewhere, there will appear a document or a detail so grotesque, so damning, that the country will finally rise as one to declare this Presidency at an end. Just one more instance of sexual assault; of cruel and illegal deportations; of financial self-dealing. Just one more indulgence of racism and antisemitism in the MAGA camp; one more outrageous insult hurled against a foreign leader or a female reporter; one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms.

There has already been a mountain of accurate reporting on Trump’s attitude toward women and the close relationship between the President and Epstein. Among the best and most comprehensive accounts was published last week in the Times. Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate explored countless documents and interviewed more than thirty of Epstein’s former employees, as well as victims. They described the relationship as one of common carnal interest.

“Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency,” Confessore and Tate wrote. “Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes. With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.”

That passage is the “billboard” of the piece, the thesis, and it is amply supported by multiple sources who describe the details of their relationship, how Trump regaled Epstein over the telephone “with tales of his sexual exploits” and how Epstein delighted in making his discomfited assistants listen on speaker. Confessore and Tate reported the recollections of a former Epstein assistant, who recounted “one call in the mid-1990s on which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had, and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with. On another, Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table.”

In the Times’ reporting, both men are portrayed in all their vanity and blithe aggression. In 1993, at one of Trump’s beauty pageants, one contestant, Béatrice Keul, then a bank employee and part-time model from Switzerland, was asked by one of Trump’s employees to meet with him privately at a suite at the Plaza: “Almost as soon as she arrived, Ms. Keul said, Mr. Trump began groping her, kissing her and trying to lift her dress. ‘I yelled, I screamed, I pushed him,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want to give up.’ ”

Before her meeting with Trump, Epstein had approached her, according to Keul, saying he was “Don’s best friend.” Would she come to Mar-a-Lago to party? “When Ms. Keul demurred,” the Times account went on, “Mr. Epstein tried other tactics—going on about the wealth he kept in Swiss banks, then about famous friends with whom he could arrange meetings. ‘Epstein knew exactly what he was doing,’ she said. ‘He had a hunting method. It was a routine.’ ”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded to the paper’s questions about its reporting by saying it was all a “fake news story.” Which is precisely where we began, on that bus, so many years ago: Deny, deny, deny, and move on. In his Op-Ed for the Times, Billy Bush recalled another off-camera remark from Trump, when Bush confronted him about lying—in this case, inflating his television ratings. “People will just believe you,” Trump said. “You just tell them and they believe you.” ♦

Paper cuts are the worst. In “No Other Choice,” a new comic thriller from the South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, You Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a longtime employee at a pulp manufacturer called Solar Paper, is one of many unceremoniously laid off after Americans take over the company. Months later, with his job search going nowhere, Man-su and his wife, Lee Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), are forced to economize. Mi-ri finds part-time work at a dentist’s office. Their dogs are sent to live with her parents. Furniture is put up for sale, Netflix is cancelled, and their children’s future hangs in the balance. When the family’s beloved house goes on the market, Man-su snaps. This can’t go on. Something must be done.

Judging by the cinema of the downsized, a subgenre as global in its reach as unemployment itself, the possibilities of that “something” are endless. Unlike the shifty protagonists of Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out” (2002) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Tokyo Sonata” (2009), Man-su, at least, does not try to hide his termination from his loved ones. Will he patiently keep seeking out jobs, like the Finnish tram driver cut loose in Aki Kaurismäki’s “Drifting Clouds” (1998)? Or will he vent his fury, like the sacked defense worker in Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down” (1993), who embarks on a brutal rampage through the streets of Los Angeles? This being a movie directed by Park, best known for the extravagant revenge thriller “Oldboy” (2005), it’s no spoiler to reveal that Man-su does not choose peace. He plots to murder a rival, Choi Sun-chul (Park Hee-soon), in hopes of replacing him as line manager at another paper company.

But getting rid of Sun-chul will not be enough. Man-su, wanting an accurate sense of his competition, invents a fake job opportunity and puts out a call for applicants. From the résumés that pour in, he deduces that there are two other highly qualified, recently laid-off paper experts, Gu Bum-mo (Lee Sung-min) and Go Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), who are likelier to be hired for Sun-chul’s position than he is, and who must therefore be eliminated first. Man-su tells himself he has “no other choice,” a phrase that reverberates through the film like a bad mantra: it’s what Solar’s new American overlords say when they kick him to the curb, and it’s also Man-su’s excuse for not trying his hand at another profession. “Paper has fed me for twenty-five years,” he declares. His fellow industry clingers-on feel a similar loyalty—and, with their sudden terminations, a similar betrayal. “No Other Choice,” a blackly comic tale of a breadwinner’s dilemma, is also about a crisis of masculinity: some men will kill to avoid learning another skill set.

Park’s film is the second adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s satirical crime novel “The Ax” (1997), which set its paper-industry murder spree somewhere in the Connecticut area. The first, also titled “The Ax” (2005), was set in France and Belgium and directed, engrossingly, by Costa-Gavras, to whom Park dedicated his own version. Clearly, Westlake’s tale can be productively transplanted to any place that knows the sting of corporate mergers and restructurings. With “No Other Choice,” Park and his co-writers—Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Jahye Lee—have repotted the story in Korean soil, which proves remarkably fertile ground. (You’ll forgive the botanical metaphors: Man-su tends plants as a hobby, with a greenhouse and a garden plot that prove convenient for the disposal of bodies.) Park, ever a fan of pulp fiction, both maintains and updates the story’s paper-industry focus. The effects of increased automation and sustainability-minded practices are duly acknowledged, but so is the ubiquity of paper, which has too many uses—lottery tickets, ice-cream-cone sleeves, and cigarette filters, for starters—to be made obsolete by the digital revolution alone.

Park’s most significant transformation is one of tone. Westlake’s novel unfolds from the point of view of its culprit, who gets a grabber of an opening line: “I’ve never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being.” Costa-Gavras’s treatment kept the hard-edged, noirish tone and sociopathic voice-over intact, and the nastier-minded Park of “Oldboy” might have done something similar. More recently, though, in films such as “The Handmaiden” (2016) and “Decision to Leave” (2022), both among his best, he has dialled back the extreme gore that was once his signature. To be sure, there are images in “No Other Choice” that sink into your brain like steel hooks—one shot of a corpse, bound and compacted for ease of burial, has a contortionist horror worthy of Francis Bacon—but there’s more winking mischief than hammer-swinging sadism in Park’s deployment of violence these days. Here, he brings out the story’s flashes of dark comedy and gives them the lavish, over-the-top exuberance of farce.

The film marks a reunion for Park and Lee Byung-hun, who had his breakout role twenty-five years ago in the director’s political thriller “Joint Security Area,” and who has since become one of Asia’s most popular stars. Best known outside Korea for his work on the series “Squid Game,” he’s a terrifically versatile talent; I’m especially fond of his prince-and-the-pauper double act in the period drama “Masquerade” (2012) and his astonishing performance, in Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” (2011), as a detective driven to extremes almost as deranged as the serial killer he’s hunting. In “No Other Choice,” he plays a murderer whose bursts of ingenuity are often waylaid by bumbling ineptitude. The part gives Lee’s comic gifts and his action chops a frenzied, intensely physical workout, whether Man-su is ducking out of sight, hurling himself down a hill, struggling for a gun, reeling from toothache, or writhing on the ground after a sudden snakebite rattles him at the worst possible moment.

Lee throws himself into all of it with a sad-sack slapstick energy that never undercuts—and, remarkably, even enhances—the psychological acuity of his acting. At fifty-five, he’s borne out the truism that certain heartthrobs, be they Ethan Hawke or Brad Pitt, become more interesting and more versatile with age; Lee, for his part, has also gotten funnier. When Man-su grins and blunders his way through a job interview early on, the glare of the sunlight in his eyes matched by the glares of his interlocutors, it’s a squirmy-funny tour de force. The deliberate exaggeration of both Lee’s performance and Park’s direction is what draws us into a suspension of moral disbelief, a sense of complicity with Man-su’s outrageous scheme. The soundtrack also helps: one of Man-su’s messier murder attempts is accompanied by Cho Yong-pil’s nostalgic 1981 hit “Redpepper Dragonfly,” a song that captures the film’s wild oscillations between comedy and tragedy and signals the first of several shifts into weirder, more poignant territory.

“No Other Choice” is, among other things, an extended meditation on marital discontent, and Man-su’s murder plot, for all the bloody chaos it leaves in its wake, also provides him with a therapeutic dose of perspective. The more he kills, the more he learns about the deep malaise—and, in some cases, eccentricity—of people he had assumed to be happier, more fortunate, and better adjusted than he is. One of the more memorable characters is Ara (a superb Yeom Hye-ran), Bum-mo’s increasingly fed-up, flagrantly unfaithful wife, who, in one harrowing confrontation, winds up both derailing and abetting the killer’s harebrained plot. Man-su and Mi-ri are more happily married, but months of unemployment and multiple homicides take their toll, excavating old resentments and failures, including Man-su’s past struggles with alcoholism. As Mi-ri gets closer to the truth, Son Ye-jin’s performance becomes bracingly unpredictable; she’s both an emotional anchor and a moral wild card.

Park’s work is defined by a freewheeling command of the camera, which he places in service of an ever more dazzling elegance of style. When Park and his director of photography, Kim Woo-hyung, send the camera soaring across the generous expanse of the Yous’ front yard—or plant it, whimsically, at the bottom of an enormous beer stein, the better to watch Man-su’s sobriety drain away—you sense their giddy enthrallment, practically to the point of arousal, by the visual possibilities of their material. This luxuriant, almost decadent virtuosity can feel out of synch with a tale of miserable, penny-pinching extremes. “No Other Choice” has drawn comparisons to Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” (2019), another bleakly funny, socially conscious Korean thriller in which desperate financial straits precipitate a whirlwind of carnage—but the showmanship of Park’s movie, unlike Bong’s, sometimes outstrips its finesse.

What “No Other Choice” and “Parasite” do have in common, fittingly, is a house to kill for. In Bong’s film, the coveted central location was a modernist masterpiece, all clean, sharp lines and immaculate surfaces. The Yous’ home, the eye-popping standout of Ryu Seong-hie’s production design, is a similarly enormous but earthier, more ramshackle affair. The interiors, dim but comfortable-looking, are full of plants and lumpy leather furniture; the exteriors are a ramshackle marvel, with red-brick arches, a long upper-story deck, and greenery spilling out in every direction. We learn early on that Man-su grew up in this house, and that he proudly bought it back years later and fixed it up himself. No wonder it looks so lived in, so jammed together, so fiercely guarded and loved. ♦

On December 14th, the ultraconservative politician José Antonio Kast won a runoff election to become Chile’s next President. With his victory, the growing club of right-wing leaders in Latin America acquired a new member. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian autocrat, sent Kast effusive congratulations. So did Elon Musk, who has fought a running battle with left-wing politicians in the region. President Donald Trump took credit for his win, adding, “I hear he’s a very good person.”

The news from Latin America has been dominated by Trump’s efforts to impose his version of the Monroe Doctrine—an ethos of blatant interventionism that includes endorsing electoral candidates, then crying fraud if they underperform; imposing his will through sanctions and punitive tariffs; and deploying the U.S. Navy off the Venezuelan coast to threaten President Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

Against this tense backdrop, Chile’s politicians offered a model of gracious behavior. Kast’s competitor, a Communist named Jeanette Jara, quickly acknowledged his victory and congratulated him. So did the current President, Gabriel Boric, a social democrat, who will step down in March after four years in office. (Chile does not allow Presidents to serve consecutive terms.) But, for observers of a historical bent, the outcome of the election presents an uncomfortable irony. Kast’s father, a German émigré, was a former Nazi officer, which means that the country that once gave refuge to the war criminal Walther Rauff—who oversaw mobile gas vans that killed roughly a hundred thousand Jews in the Second World War—has elected the son of another Nazi as President.

When I raised the issue with an acquaintance of mine who supports Kast, he chided me that the sins of the twentieth century weren’t relevant now. Yet there are other disturbing synergies with the authoritarian past. Kast will be the furthest-right politician to lead Chile since General Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in a bloody coup in 1973 and ruled for seventeen long years, during which his government killed three thousand people and tortured tens of thousands more. According to Philippe Sands’s recently published book “38 Londres Street,” Pinochet, a Germanophile, met Rauff in Ecuador a few years after the war and invited him to Chile. There, Rauff worked as the manager of a crab cannery in Patagonia, and apparently as an interrogator in one of Pinochet’s torture centers. He lived out the rest of his life in Chile, unrepentant about his crimes and protected from extradition.

For those who recall the impunity of those years, Kast’s election signifies an end to a thirty-five-year period in which most Chileans repudiated Pinochet’s legacy. “Kast has never criticized Pinochet’s dictatorship, and in that sense he represents one of his most faithful heirs,” Patricio Fernández, a prominent Chilean commentator, noted recently. Indeed, Kast has repeatedly lauded Pinochet’s regime, in which one of his brothers served as a minister and as the president of the central bank. In 1988, when Pinochet called a national referendum to extend his rule, Kast, who was then a twenty-two-year-old law student, was a vocal supporter.

The referendum failed, and, two years later, Chile returned to democracy. Kast, despite his preference for autocracy, took advantage of the restored political freedoms. He won a parliamentary seat in 2001 and eventually began running for President. In 2017, he finished fourth. Four years later, after founding his own right-wing party, he came in second, to Boric. Kast conceded defeat without complaint. He stands out from some of his right-wing colleagues for his relatively understated demeanor; he is neither as flamboyant as Javier Milei, in Argentina, nor as gleefully vicious as Nayib Bukele, in El Salvador. A pro-life Catholic with nine children, he opposes gay marriage and trans rights, objects to taxes and big government, and dislikes environmental regulations—but he presents his views in a lawyerly, reasonable-sounding way.

After losing to Boric, Kast built his following by amplifying concerns around uncontrolled immigration and increasing public insecurity. Chile has a higher standard of living than most of its neighbors and is an attractive destination for migrants. In the past decade, some two million migrants have entered the country, which has a population of only nineteen million. As in the U.S., the new arrivals have been blamed for an uptick in violent crime. Kast promised a hardline response: he vowed to deport more than three hundred thousand undocumented migrants, many of them from Venezuela, and to build several maximum-security detention centers to accommodate others. To stem the influx, he would erect fences and dig ditches along the borders with Bolivia and Peru.

Chile has spent a decade oscillating between the center left and the center right, and Kast’s election is a departure—as well as an echo of a regional trend toward authoritarianism. After his victory, he travelled to Argentina, where he met with Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who delights followers with performative attacks on the opposition. (In a WhatsApp exchange with me after Kast’s victory, Milei credited the ascent of the Latin American right to voters’ impatience with “suffocating taxation” and “the inefficiency, obscene privileges, and hypocrisy of left-wing politicians.”) The two posed for photos next to a chainsaw, the talisman for Milei’s efforts to slash government. Since assuming office, in 2023, Milei has eliminated half of Argentina’s ministries. He has also espoused unswerving loyalty to Trump, echoing many of his positions. In exchange, the U.S. has supplied billions of dollars of bailout money to ease Argentina’s enormous debts. Standing beside Milei, Kast theatrically exclaimed, “Freedom advances throughout Latin America!” But, when reporters asked if he planned to bring the chainsaw ideology to Chile, he hedged, saying only that his team had been “consulting” with friendly governments—including the right-wing administrations in Argentina, Hungary, Italy, and the U.S.

Kast also said that he’d spoken with two conservative candidates whom he’d defeated in the Chilean election, suggesting that he might bring them into his government. They are the former labor minister Evelyn Matthei, whose father was a general in Pinochet’s regime, and a bombastic hard-right politician with the extravagant name of Johannes Maximilian Kaiser Barents-von Hohenhagen. Kaiser, also of German descent, shares many of Kast’s views, but presents them less decorously; he describes himself as a “paleolibertarian” and “reactionary,” and endorses building detention camps for undocumented migrants and entirely closing the border with Bolivia. He calls for Pinochet-era torturers and murderers to be released from prison. Kast does, too, but he says it more elliptically. Earlier this month, as Chile’s parliament was discussing a bill to release aging or infirm repressors from prison, Kast said, “I don’t believe in plea bargaining. I believe in justice. And this means treating people with terminal illnesses, or those who are [no longer conscious], with respect.”

In 2023, on the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup, Boric reminded Chileans of the terrible price their country had paid, and announced a national search plan to ascertain the destinies of as many as three thousand citizens who remain missing. There are tens of thousands of people in Chile who survived being attacked by their own government, or who lost loved ones. This means that Kast will likely have to move carefully on issues of “historical memory.” But, half a century after the Pinochet coup, there is a disquieting trend in the hemisphere. That coup, which overthrew a Socialist government allied with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, was abetted by the Nixon Administration and its regional allies—right-wing military regimes that proceeded to wage a series of dirty wars against leftist citizens of their own countries. In Trump’s current standoff with Maduro, whom he has branded a “narcoterrorist,” right-wingers such as Kast and Milei have endorsed pushing him out of office by force.

Trump’s bellicose rhetoric in Latin America echoes his language at home, where he denounces Democratic politicians as “left-wing maniacs” and calls those who protest his deportation policies “Antifa militants.” Trump has also worked to extirpate the uncomfortable past, forcing historical makeovers in schools, national parks, and cultural institutions—as well as claiming that, three decades after the end of apartheid in South Africa, white Boers are the true victims of racism.

Kast, despite his mild demeanor, has echoed Trump’s tough-guy tone. He has called to “make Chile a great country” and said that it needs to be ruled by a “firm hand.” His campaign slogan was “The Strength of Change.” It is hard to say how far he, and his peers in the region, will go. In Argentina and Peru, right-wing politicians have already pushed to efface human-rights laws in order to free military men imprisoned for crimes against humanity. Daniel Noboa, the President of Ecuador and a Trump ally, summoned the changing ethos in a recent interview with me. “The twenty-first century was based on the concept of social justice,” he said. “It worked for a little while, then it became more unjust than before. The core concept became broken. It gave the right an opportunity.” Now, he suggested, people just wanted power on their side—“anything that is stricter and stronger against crime and the political class.” ♦

Dear Pepper is an advice-column comic by Liana Finck. If you have questions for Pepper, the advice-giving dog, about how to act in difficult situations, please direct them to [email protected]. Questions may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Dear Pepper,

I write incessantly in my journal. It is easier for me to write my truth than to speak it. I like to imagine that I’m working toward writing a memoir concerning something no one really knows about (so, a confession, an offering of truth).

My worry: Am I really a writer, or is this consuming project just my form of therapy, a desire to show my real self and beg for acceptance and love? If that’s what it is, does it deserve to be read by others? It feels awfully self-serving.

Pepper, thanks for taking the time to try to decipher my question (even that is helpful!).

Kind Regards,
J

Dear J,

When I️ do what I️ define as “creative work,” I️ expend about ninety per cent of my energy staving off a terrible queasy feeling—an anhedonic sense of doom—that I’ve been trying to decode. So here goes . . .

It’s a feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing what I’m doing or why, which it sounds like you can relate to. It’s a feeling that I’m wasting time (lately, precious paid-nanny time.) To say that I️ don’t do well with uncertainty is an understatement. A coffee meeting without a definite purpose is enough to throw me into a days-long spiral of dread. In such instances, I forgive myself the dread spiral: I’m a draw-er, not a hanger-outer, and I’m O.K. with that. But when the terrible dread spiral stems from my work—the thing that’s supposed to make me feel safe and happy—I just don’t know what to do. So, on top of the dread spiral itself, I also feel shame.

How’s that for confessional?

To deal with the queasy feeling, I️’ve developed a very small arsenal of two tools that I hope can be helpful to you. My first tool is catharsis: to look straight into the darkness and attempt to define it. I do this by drawing and writing. Are these drawings and writings art? I️’ve learned that I don’t really care. That’s not my particular hangup, though my ability to make a living from them is.

My second tool is to get out of my own head so that the feeling recedes. Over the years, I’ve learned different ways of doing this, from sucking on candies to running to listening to podcasts to going to parties. (I️ dread a coffee date but I️ love a party—it’s such an efficient way of being social.) The ultimate distraction, of course, is children (or in my case, puppies), but I’ll save that for another column.

Even as a practitioner of confessional art myself—am I? Or am I just a letter-reading dog?—I️ can’t definitively answer your question about whether your writing is worthy of being read by others. But I️ can tell you that the feelings you describe are a dragon that stands at the gate of your work, and your task is to figure out how to engage with it: slay it, skirt it, soothe it, or ride it. I think all artists (and probably all people) eventually have to deal with a dragon or two. The point is to handle yours wisely.

Sincerely, sincerely, sincerely,
Pepper

Let’s say, for the sake of the following discussion, that we agree on the following:

1. Teen-agers have First Amendment rights.
2. Social media has become the place where people, especially young people, express their views.
3. Social media is very bad for kids.

The question, given these facts, is: How much are we willing to restrict the free speech of teen-agers in order to protect them from the ills propagated by social-media companies?

I posed this question a couple years back, when writing about legislation in Utah that would have placed a strict age restrictions on the use of social media. To enforce this law, Utah could have required people to verify their birth dates using government identification—a method that would have excluded from the internet’s public square not only kids but all sorts of adults who happen to lack government I.D. At the time I wrote about the legislation, I mostly agreed with arguments that were made against it by the A.C.L.U and the Electronic Frontier Foundation: although I would rather my own children not touch a social-media platform until they are sixteen years old—or ever, really—the encroachment on free expression was too egregious to abide. Utah passed the legislation, but a judge blocked its implementation pending the resolution of a lawsuit filed by a trade organization backed by giant tech companies.

This month, an even stricter law, the Online Safety Amendment Act, went into effect in Australia. It effectively bans everyone under the age of sixteen from the major social-media platforms. Social-media companies are required to take “reasonable steps” to follow the law; any company in violation of this will be fined roughly thirty million dollars. There are no penalties in place for users or their families, but everyone in Australia who wants to use social media could have to submit to a fairly onerous series of age verifications—for instance, uploading a video selfie that will be analyzed by artificial intelligence.

The act was passed a year ago in Australia’s House of Representatives by a vote of 101–13. And polling conducted in the past year shows somewhere between sixty-seven and eighty per cent of Australian adults support the bill. At the same time, less than half of the Australian public believes the ban will be effective—and, according to a recent poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald, fewer than a third of parents plan to enforce the ban in their households, by deleting the relevant apps off their children’s phones. What this means is that many young people will be able to get around the bans, for example by using virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, which can make an internet user appear to be in a different country. Early reports indicate that kids are fooling the age-recognition software with sophisticated techniques such as drawing on facial hair and substituting celebrity photos for their own.

What seems most likely: the law will not be rigidly enforced, as teen-agers and social-media companies figure out ways to circumvent the ban, but the social norm established by the law and its robust popularity among politicians and voters will lead to a significant downturn in social-media use by minors nonetheless. Not every fourteen-year-old is going to draw a moustache on their photograph or get a fake I.D.—and the law should be easier to enforce among younger kids, which may mean that in five or so years it will be rare to find a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old in Australia who has ever posted anything on social media.

This seems like a pretty good result—if you believe, as I do, that social media is obviously bad for children and adults alike. But it returns us to the question I posed at the start of this column, which has a particular relevance for Americans, who live in a country founded on the principle of free speech. The civil-libertarian argument against laws like the one that Australia has passed will probably win out in this country, if only because it happens to be aligned, in this case, with powerful domestic tech companies. That argument is simple, but bears repeating: we shouldn’t place arbitrary age limits on who gets to express themselves in the digital town square, and we shouldn’t require everyone who wants to express their opinions online to submit to an I.D. check. As a journalist, I’m also aware that, for many people, social media is a source of news. It may be a toxic and wildly imperfect alternative to legacy media, but I don’t think we should use government force to effectively reroute children to more traditional sources of information.

In my column on this subject two years ago, I compared the attempt to restrict social-media use to adults to earlier efforts to do something similar with tobacco. The remarkably successful fight against youth smoking did rely, in part, on a shift in social norms; it also depended on a variety of legal restrictions, and heavy taxation—and I did not, at the time, see what equivalent measures might be taken with social media. Ultimately, I thought it might just come down to parents holding the line.

I’m less pessimistic now. One of the recurring themes I discuss on “Time to Say Goodbye,” the podcast I host with the Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper, is what a good life looks like today. When politicians, especially liberal ones, discuss the society that they want to help bring into reality, what are the shared values that they imagine will hold people together? I’m not talking about kitchen-table issues, as important as they are, or even about tolerance and equality. What I have in mind is a vision of how Americans should live on a daily basis in a time when technology runs our lives. The Times columnist Ezra Klein addressed this recently in a piece about the “politics of attention” and the question of “human flourishing.” He concluded, “I don’t believe it will be possible for society to remain neutral on what it means to live our digital lives well.”

I ultimately agree with Klein that we will not be neutral forever, even if our courts make an Australia-like ban nearly impossible. But I have come to believe that, in the not too distant future, the concerns of crusty civil libertarians such as myself will be pushed aside, and a new set of social norms will emerge, especially in the middle and upper classes. The signs of this quiet revolution waged on behalf of internet-addicted children are already all around us. School districts around the country are banning phones from the classroom. “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, which directly informed the new law in Australia, has been on the Times best-seller list for eighty-five weeks, and has inspired little acts of tech rebellion by parents around the country.

The nascent anti-smartphones movement in America is decidedly nonpartisan, for the most part, and this contributes to its potential and also to the vagueness of its outlines. It also has taken place almost entirely at the local and state level. More than thirty states in the country now have some form of cellphone ban in their schools, which should be applauded. I believe that teen-agers should have the right to post their opinions on social media, but I don’t think they need to do that in the middle of geometry class. If this means that First Amendment rights are further restricted in schools, that may be a compromise that free-speech absolutists have to accept.

What world will this revolution bring about? And how long will it last before a new set of online distractions replaces social media? Social movements are never clean and surgical; social-media companies will not be the only casualties. If there is an emerging national morality to the anti-smartphones movement, it’s one that feels suspicious of technology in general—it reflects not only a worry about the effect of tech on children but also a deep displeasure with how adults conduct their business and their leisure. And as long as we cannot tear ourselves away from Slack, Instagram, or gossipy group texts, the rules that we socially dictate for our children will be compromised and incomplete. Australia’s ban might be seen more fruitfully as a restriction not on children but on their parents: a comprehensive and wide-ranging demand that the state lay down rules Australian parents cannot enforce on their own.

A vision of a better digital life shouldn’t just focus on children, but also on workplaces and adult social norms. We all need to put down the phones and make efforts to move the public square away from private technology companies that incentivize cheap engagement. The scope should also be widened to include prescriptions on what we should do with all our newfound time, especially with our children—because, I think, our aversion to social media and phones really stands in for a broader discomfort with how scheduled, atomized, and expensive their lives have become. ♦